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Patrick Condon, an urban design professor at the University of British Columbia, is hoping to run for mayor of Vancouver. (Supplied)

Patrick Condon, a University of British Columbia urban design professor who intends to seek the mayoral nomination for the Coalition of Progressive Electors, isn’t so circumspect.

“People want to have a different voice and I’m happy to try to provide that,” Condon told StarMetro in a telephone interview.

“The housing market has failed, is completely broken and a lot of people … have lost their faith in the market.”

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COPE was once a dominant force in Vancouver city politics, but for over a decade the party has been sidelined by more centrist parties like Vision Vancouver. After COPE took a hard-left turn prior to the 2014 election, some members of the party formed the offshoot OneCity, which is also running candidates for council and the school board this election.

In an October 2017 byelection, COPE endorsed Jean Swanson, an anti-poverty activist who had garnered a following of young campaigners and was pushing for a mansion tax and a rent freeze. She ran as an independent and came in second in the byelection.

This time around, Swanson is running with COPE for council, along with Anne Roberts and Derrick O’Keefe. Condon previously worked with the Vancouver Greens on their election platforms. But he said he was attracted by Swanson’s ideas and the energy of her young supporters, who have crafted savvy messaging and drawn media attention by holding events like bringing an enormous “Jeanex” box to the affluent Shaughnessy neighbourhood.

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Condon won’t know for sure whether he has the COPE nomination until Aug. 19, when the party will hold a final vote; COPE could choose to nominate him, or to endorse one of two independent mayoral candidates, Kennedy Stewart and Shauna Sylvester, who hope to get the support of COPE, OneCity and the Greens.

Condon said he saw a missing voice in the race; candidates who were willing to shake things up in the current housing system. He said he aspired to be a Bernie Sanders-like candidate and offer voters “the fire of the old left” compared to the centre-left Vision Vancouver or centre-right NPA.

“I didn’t think there was a very strong voice at all in the race in any of the parties who were forcefully saying the housing market is broken,” he said.

“They were reluctant to give any proposals generally, and no proposals that seemed like a departure from the status quo.”

Condon wants to raise taxes, both on homeowners and on developers, and use the proceeds — as well as contributions from the province and federal government — to raise the amount of non-market housing to represent 50 per cent of the city’s housing stock.

He insists that raising development fees won’t make housing more expensive — a common concern for real estate developers, who say they must pass on any increase to homebuyers.

“It’s not true. What (increased fees) really do is subtract from the cost of land and we have a situation where the land is inflated so high, it’s outrageous,” Condon said, using as an example the record sale of a one-acre site on Georgia St. that sold for a record $245 million in 2017.

“All that profit went to the land owner and the land speculator and none of that went to the city. Strategically, a set of taxes on development land can capture that money instead of the money going to land speculators, who’ve done nothing to earn it.”

Instead of the province’s new surtax on the value of properties over $3 million, Condon said he wants to see the City of Vancouver allowed to levy a progressive property tax that would tax high-value properties at a higher rate (this idea is the same as Swanson’s “mansion tax”).

He also wants to see Vancouver quickly adopt a citywide plan that, he said, would modernize obsolete zoning and allow for more density in single-family home neighbourhoods. Condon said a citywide plan would also provide clarity to homeowners and builders, who would not have to go through lengthy permitting processes for each project.

Condon thinks this wouldn’t create a land-value spike in neighbourhoods: “My hypothesis is that the rapid rise in the value of land has been driven by the city’s process of only releasing some land at a time.”

Although he’s a professor immersed in planning and land use policy, Condon has a flair for the dramatic. He says it’s imperative to switch away from the market-based real estate system to one where government is much more heavily involved because the future of the city is at stake.

“If the trajectory of the city is to persist, there would be no way for working families to live here,” he said.

“We’re well on our way to becoming the Monaco of North America: a great place to park your cash and to visit every year or two, but otherwise very few people who earn ordinary wages will be able to live here.”

Jen St. Denis is a Vancouver-based reporter covering affordability and city hall. Follow her on Twitter: @jenstden

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